Lorena found a tulip place about a half an hour from our house in Mossyrock. It does not have as many tulips as the Woodburn tulip farm, but it is in a tremendously beautiful settings. She discovered a beautiful lake we did not know was right around the corner and came home excited for next year. We will have to go buy some tulips from them to plant at our house this fall.
Month: April 2018
The new Ubuntu operating system (Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS) came out yesterday and I installed it today. So far it is great. I had been using Xubuntu up until now, but have decided I am going to try Ubuntu for awhile and then Linux Mint (Cinnamon) when it comes out for awhile before I decide on where to the settle for the next few years. I am really glad Ubuntu went back to Gnome and a way from Unity. That was the main reason I switched to Xubuntu in the first place–so I did not have to deal with Unity. My good buddy, Lyle W. has been raving about Mint for quite a few years now as have many others, so I think I need to give that a try.
We had the fruit trees in the back yard pruned in February with the hope they might produce a better crop than we got last year. The reality is that it was not so bad last year–Bob brought his apple picker over and harvested a good amount of apples. Lorena made applesauce with her own apples for the very first time. The trees had not been pruned for a long, long time, so with this pruning we are hoping to see some improvement over last year. Now, all we have to do is get Bob to come back over with his apple picker…
We are seeing lots of amazing things around the place now that the sun has begun to shine. We need to put up our birdhouses and bird feeders so we can enjoy some of this. It is fabulous to hear all the birds singing and the woodpeckers pecking. There is lots and lots of activity right now.
I have been about 40 lbs. down from my high for over a month now since Jon W. and I first started our weight loss plan a little after Thanksgiving last year. It is good I am down and not going back up, but it is not so good I have been stuck for so long. I would like to say that I am on this plateau just because my metabolism has adjusted, but that would not be entirely true.
The reality is that, after three months of great progress, I am finding it hard to stay on my low calorie diet (I found I can lose weight if I stick to under 1200 calories). I keep falling off the wagon on the weekends. This is a very bad sign because I have a trip to Phoenix coming up followed by a trip to Canada for work after that and a trip to Mexico in early to mid summer which, given the family into which I married, will involve lots and lots of red meat. Based on my track record, none of these bode well for my diet.
I really and truly want to build on my current level of diet success. I have hit a new level of healthy blood pressure and cholesterol measurements, the reacquired abilities to put on my socks without asphyxiating myself and to actually cross one leg over the other when I am sitting down, and the ability to wear clothes I have not worn for years. I do not want to lose that. So, having succeeded in the past with a low carbohydrate diet, I have decided to switch to that for the next few months of barbecues, carnes asadas, and eating in restaurants.
The last thing I have decided is that, if Jon is game, I want to extend our battle plan to one with an indefinite end (maybe until death, but that is actually kind of definite). I was thinking if I did this until the end of the year, that would be good enough. Now though, even when I get down to my desired weight, I am pretty sure I am going to need to keep on keeping track.
I really did not have a lot of bandwidth today to be reflecting on life, but due to and serendipitous juxtaposition of events it came to my mind that we live in peculiar times. Overnight, new things turn into institutions and just as quickly, fall into oblivion–Facebook, Barack Obama, Kombucha, and on and on. Everything is not like that. Degrees that have hard math in them will still get you a way better job than degrees with minimal math, Washington still grows the best apples, and Jesus is still the same and always will be. Still, it feels like stuff is moving really, really fast politically, morally, economically, and every other way I can imagine. Some of it is for the better (Obama is gone and Hillary is not president), some of it is for the worse (California in general), and some of is hard to tell (Trump).
All this might be because I am just getting older and time seems to be passing more quickly. In all this, the thing to which my reflection left me is that the need to do meaningful things with what time I have left and to not be absorbed by the Borg seems more urgent to me than ever. I wish I would have had this sense of urgency at a younger age. One thing for which I am very grateful is that I did have a strong sense of urgency with respect to the way we raised our kids. We did not get it all right and we failed at more than a few things, but it was not because we did not give it our best shot.
So, the upshot is that there are some opportunities coming up for me that will force me into some interesting decisions. I want to make sure I do the meaningful thing–something I have been given to do, rather than what is easy or even fun.
We never get tired of this. There were a bunch right out the front door. Most of them left, but one of them decided to stick around, take a seat, rest a little, and watch Lorena as she walked around outside.
The tulips have been in bloom for awhile and the rhodies are now out in all their glory. In the meantime, I got absolutely nothing accomplished this weekend other than a great visit with friends on Saturday morning. During the traditional time for spring cleaning, I sat on my duff. I have always been a rebel that way. I broke my diet badly, too. I like to think it was all in the name of mental health. No excuses going forward though–I have three big new projects, my day job, and a week of vacation with Christian in Arizona coming up, so the busyness starts today.
Lorena and I drove up to Lacey this morning to have breakfast with our dear, life-long friends, Brent and Susie this morning. It reminded us we are not doing nearly as much of that as we should. Had a breakfast that broke the diet pretty badly, but talked about life old times, and trials with our kids. We are so glad to have them close by. Susie came to our wedding in Mexico 25 years ago, but we have been close friends for a lot longer than that. We have common connections in Virginia, North Carolina, Oregon (of course), and many other places around the country.
We inaugurated the new grill last night. I must say I think it was a wild success. Lorena and I split the steak in the picture (3 oz. each) so I even stayed on track with the diet. Jon and I have both been in stasis on our diet for the last month due to (speaking for myself, not for Jon) a total lack of discipline in the face of ham dinners with scalloped potatoes and angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries for dessert. Nevertheless, we are both back in the saddle and ready to engage the battle one more time.
I am seventy percent of the way to where I need to be and it is actually getting easier because I have upped my calorie intake to something a little more reasonable (600/day to 1100/day) and I am still losing weight. The thing I have at the forefront of my mind is that when I actually get to a weight I want to sustain, I can kick my calories up a few hundred more per day.
I committed to Jon to stick out our tracking plan through at least the end of this year, but I think the thing to do might be to just start a new graph when we get to the end of the year.
This is just a marker post so we will remember when this happened. Christian received notification yesterday that his first, first-author refereed journal article was accepted for publication by the journal Entropy. I am not sure when will be the actual publication date.
After all the hullabaloo yesterday about getting the exact same grill as we had when we were in Albany, Lorena shows up with one that is half the size (and, thankfully, half the price)–the mind of a woman. Her thinking is that we need a smaller grill for the porch and if we need something bigger, we can run a gas line and put in an actual outdoor kitchen. And rightly so. It is a really nice grill by KitchenAid with only two burners. The reality is 99% of the time we are cooking for 6-7 people or less. Maybe we can talk Tio Lauro into building us one of those really nice mesquite asadores out of block when he come up to visit.
Lorena sent me this photo today. It is the same grill we had when we lived in Albany. Well, I am sure it has some revisions and upgrades. We loved that grill. We got one in North Carolina that was nice, but we did not like it nearly as much. This is kind of a big deal for us. We (and I am using the royal “we” in this case because I am really talking about just Lorena) LOVE to cook on the grill–even in the dead of winter when it is snowing. This is the grill that has five burners–four main burners and a side burner she used mostly to cook corn on the cob while grilling carne asada.
The back story is that she went to Costco because we are having company over on Sunday for lunch. The thing is on sale for around $200 off. I don’t know if I quite have the budget for it, but we will tighten our belts for a month or so to assure we have room. This will be great for future invites to the house. Hope we can get Bob, Gena, and Bonnie over to inaugurate the thing.
The Rhodies are going to be in full bloom within a week are so. The tulips are still fabulous. It truly feels like spring. For the first time in… ever… we are having people over for lunch on Sunday without Bob, Gena, and Bonnie. Don’t know if we can do it, but we will give it the old college try. We have been so busy with work and visiting kids and remodeling and travel, we are glad things are slowing down a bit before things take off again at the end of April.
Jon and I are blasting away at our health care kick and I am at a plateau while he is going down. I think we should call it the 1955 diet. I think I have something figured out though. My physician’s assistant told me that my metabolism will slow way down and I might quit losing weight, even at my intake of 600 or so calories per day. So, I went off my diet for a three day weekend, then upped my caloric intake to between 900 and 1000 calories per day and although I am not at my lowest weight, I have started down again. I need to start kicking up the exercise a little bit more now as I get close to my goal weight.
We have been looking for some place to store and manage all of the electronics, cables, and sundry junk I have sitting around. Today, she bought these three tool chests at our local Ace Hardware for less than $85 including tax. I would say it was a pretty good deal. It was on sale for $99, but had a ding, so she talked them down to $75 and was quite pleased with herself. I was pleased with her, too. Now all I have to do is untangle all those cables and figure out how to organize the stuff well enough in the draws so that I will be able to find it all again. Right now, I know where it all is even if it is in a big heap in those big plastic totes. It takes a half an hour to pull out the tote and get things untangled because the thing you want is always at the bottom of the bottom box in the stack.